Nordelta is Argentina’s most well-known gated community: an enclave of spacious homes for the rich amid a dreamy landscape of lakes and streams north of Buenos Aires.
Environmentalists question the gated community’s existence because it is built on the wetlands of the Parana, the second-most important river in South America after the Amazon.
However, nature is fighting back against Nordelta’s well-heeled residents.
Photo: Reuters
In the past few weeks, the community has been invaded by capybaras, which have destroyed manicured lawns, bitten dogs and caused traffic accidents.
“They not only destroy gardens, but their excrement has also become a problem,” one local man told the daily La Nacion, complaining that local wildlife officials had prohibited residents from touching the rodents.
Some Nordelta residents are reported to have responded by bringing out their hunting rifles, but many other Argentinians have taken to social media to defend the outsized rodents — known locally as carpinchos.
In politically polarized Argentina, progressive Peronists see Nordelta as the enclave of an upper class eager to exclude common people — and with tongue only partly in cheek, some have portrayed the capybaras as a rodent vanguard of the class struggle.
“My total support for the Peronist carpinchos of Nordelta recoveringtheir habitat,” one person wrote on Twitter.
Adult capybaras can grow up to 1m in length, stand over 60cm tall and can weigh up to 60kg. They are naturally gregarious and live in groups of 10 to 20 individuals.
It was a mistake to frame the rodent influx as an invasion, ecologist Enrique Viale said.
“It’s the other way round: Nordelta invaded the ecosystem of the carpinchos,” said Viale, who has been campaigning with many others for 10 years for the Argentine National Congress to pass a law to defend the wetlands from development.
“Wealthy real-estate developers with government backing have to destroy nature in order to sell clients the dream of living in the wild — because the people who buy those homes want nature, but without the mosquitoes, snakes or carpinchos,” he said.
These vast Parana wetlands stretch from northern Argentina to the River Plate and the Atlantic Ocean, but have come under attack from urban sprawl, as well as cattle and soy mega-farmers who are partly responsible for the wildfires that have destroyed vast areas.
“Nordelta is the super-sized paradigm of gated communities built on wetlands. The first thing it does is take away the absorbent function of the land, so when there are extreme weather events, it is the poorer surrounding neighborhoods that end up flooded,” Viale said. “As always, it is the poor who end paying the price.”
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